updated 05:05 pm EST, Sat March 1, 2008

i-Mate closes US office

i-Mate's office in Redmond, Washington has been almost completely dissolved, with the company laying off almost its entire workforce, while others left on their own volition. According toEngadget, the Dubai-based company ran into problems with US distribution of its Ultimate line of communication devices. This led to i-Mate laying off almost its entire US operations team, including the engineering, quality assurance, and technical writing departments.

The company will still sell unlocked product through a US web portal, which the former sales director has supposedly agreed to run.

The closure comes shortly after i-Mate had refreshed the Ultimate line of products with HSUPA internet connectivity on February 12th, which evidently wasn't enough to sustain the company.

Imate

high on promise,

low on delivery and marketing?
It seems it had connectivity options far beyond your US cell phone company offerings, but R&D and marketing wasn't funded sufficiently to gain a significant advantage and mind-share advantage.

Too bad for the employees, apparently. It's good that someone has agreed to maintain contact with the company's existing customer base, but sadly, it's a sales person. The only way "the name" could redeem itself is through a strong connection with the developer community, and an undying love of the project by its final representative. That's a staggeringly up-hill struggle for capital and buy-in just waiting to happen.

Perhaps a strategic partnership from the copy-write/trademark/patent holders with a Skype or other marginally interested relevant party is the only real avenue...

Good luck on providing a robust user experience regardless of the user's computer platform choice.

lamewing

lamewing, don't lecture beluashark...this was headlined at macnn, and I don't know about you, buy the access keys for this article are mac (win) and I'm being gently reminded for a longer post, I need to visit the macintosh area at forums.macnn.com

So YOU pay attention. The owners of macnn are driving traffic to their non-mac site, on non-mac articles....and quit trying to make the world upside, people have a right to complain about it.